REPORT: VIOLENCE EASING IN MEXICO

USD institute finds decline in slayings

Violence in Mexico appears to have leveled off or declined in the past year, according to a new report from the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

“Things are looking a bit better in Mexico,” said David Shirk, the institute’s director and one of the report’s authors. “Particularly in places like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, we can say violence has gone down.”

The report’s analysis suggests that Mexico could be turning a corner following a period of unprecedented violence as drug-trafficking groups battled one another and government forces. It estimates that the total number of homicides in 2012 fell to “somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000” following a record high in 2011, when one Mexican government tally showed more than 27,000 killings.

“Available evidence suggests that there has indeed been a significant slowdown in homicides and organized-crime-style killings over the last two years,” the report states. “The main question remains whether violence is in decline or has reached a plateau.”

The report’s release on Tuesday comes at a key time for Mexico, about two months after President Enrique Peña Nieto began a six-year term and pledged to bring down the levels of violence in the country. Peña Nieto has promised to focus on crime prevention — a different strategy from his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, who concentrated on dismantling drug-trafficking organizations and arresting their top leaders.

Shirk said one of the report’s goals is “to get some clarity on what is the true nature of the security situation in Mexico.” The country’s safety and security are “a vital issue for the United States,” he said. “It’s a country that Americans travel to more than any other country in the world.”

At the same time, the study’s authors said, “Mexico’s security situation has arguably attracted a disproportionate amount of attention and concern in international media and policy circles compared to other countries in Latin America.” Honduras has more than four times as many homicides per capita as Mexico, Guatemala twice as many and Colombia one-and-a-half times as many, according to the report.

The authors said tracking homicide numbers in Mexico is a difficult task, a challenge often raised by academics and human-rights activists in Mexico. The institute’s analysis for 2012 looked at data from the Mexican National Security System, as well as figures reported by two Mexican media organizations, Reforma and Milenio.

These sources’ numbers typically do not coincide, and that makes it tough to draw definitive conclusions.

As a result, “we don’t know if we could say if it was a significant decrease, but it was at least a leveling off or a modest decrease,” Shirk said. “The concern that I have is just as these critical changes are occurring, the Mexican government has begun to reduce access to data and information that corroborates this. We want to have a measure of whether the Mexican government is succeeding in solving the public-security problem or not.”

Mexican scholar Raúl Benítez Manaut, president of the Collective for the Analysis of Security With Democracy, said the Trans-Border Institute’s report “is a good effort, but it doesn’t give me reason for optimism.” While violence in Mexico has decreased, he said, “it is not a significant amount.”